Blog Post

Joyent founder Jason Hoffman steps down

Jason Hoffman, who co-founded Joyent 10 years ago, is stepping down from his post as CTO. In a blog post Monday night, Hoffman noted that his departure “is undoubtedly bittersweet” but that he will advise the company, which he said is well positioned for the future.

Joyent, which “started as a small solution to a personal problem has grown into a tremendous company and a significant player in the cloud computing business,” he wrote. In fact, Hoffman was driven to work on scalable systems when his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and he wanted to work on a cure.

As Stacey Higginbotham wrote last year:

He quit his day job as a cancer pathologist, moved from San Diego to San Francisco, and spent the next 18 months working with his mom’s treatment team to develop a custom-drug program.

Her treatment was “unorthodox” because it combined research on specific cancers with genetic analysis on his mom. That genetic analysis required a lot of computing power optimized for visualizing data — power that Hoffman supplied with his hosting company, Joyent.

In the blog post, he wrote: “I believe that Joyent’s Manta compute on storage innovation will disrupt the storage and big data analytics markets, even as it is just starting to get major traction.”

Hoffman has been a welcome fixture at our Structure events — as he will be next week at Structure:Europe, so we can hit him up for details in London. Hoffman has always been ready to provide an informed — often pointed — opinion on the topic of the day whether it was the cult-like ethos of another cloud provider or the sanctimony of Americans crying foul over Chinese censorship.

Here’s hoping Hoffman will keep making himself available going forward. Whatever he chooses to do next will be worth watching.

3 Responses to “Joyent founder Jason Hoffman steps down”

Jason has been and will continue to play an important role for Joyent. He dedicated an incredible amount of time and energy to the company and helped us with some fundamental shifts. Without Jason (and Joyent) the world would not be talking about Node.js today. Take that impact and add in numerous others that will have a similar long-term impact, and you kind of get the point. Knowing Jason I have no doubt he’ll continue to have this impact and we’ll all be better off for it.

This is sad news for Joyent, but for the technology community a definite new “thread” to watch. Jason was instrumental in the cloud industry’s growth and evolution. He was also a great advisor to the Structure conference as a friend of GigaOM.

Personally and selfishly, I am sure that this is good news for Jason, who will be up to something new I am guessing :-)